In 2020, music theorist Megan Lyons and I analyzed the seven most common undergraduate music theory textbooks used in the U.S. We found that only 49 of the nearly 3,000 musical examples they cited were written by composers who were not white. A composer, arranger, performer and producer, Jones was a musician whose influence on American music is hard to overstate. He won 28 Grammy Awards, wrote multiple film scores and was intimately involved in some of the most important musical developments in America in the mid-to-late 20th century, such as the rise of the jazz artist as pop music arranger. He produced the world's best-selling album of all time, Michael Jackson's 'Thriller.' Early on, he performed with legends such as Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra, and he produced and arranged music for vocal titans such as Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Diana Ross. His pivot to pop music in the late 1970s helped usher in a revolution of funk, disco and early...
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